With Microsoft Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010 you can finally get photos into your global address list (GAL) and see just who’s who on your emails. What’s the best way to get all those photos into your GAL? The answer is Outlook Photos from Exclaimer – and it’s absolutely free!

When Microsoft released Exchange 2010, they said that if we want to have HA solution on all Exchange levels, we need to have at least 4 Exchange Server, 2 Mailbox server, configured as a DAG and two CAS/HUB servers that using Windows NLB. The new failover isn’t really building on a two server setup. DAG uses Windows’ Failover Clustering to provide failover on the Mailbox Database level. Failover Clustering is not compatible with Network Load Balancing (NLB) and NLB is used for failover of the Client Access Server (CAS) role. I don’t want to talk about Windows NLB  (Even Microsoft doesn’t want to talk about it anymore ). I was asked some question many, many times, “Why we can’t have a HA just with two Exchange 2010 Server?”. The official question is: “Yes, you can, but you have to have Load Balancer”.  As an alternative one could use a hardware or software load balancer that loads balances TCP/IP traffic, but those don’t come cheap, which doesn’t really make sense for the smaller shops.

After a lot of thinking, Binging (I’m not Googlening anymore   ), discussing and experimenting, I found a solution ...

Microsoft have changed their support statement on virtualizing unified messaging role and running DAG members on hypervisor based clustered hosts.

Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer..Click here

The ExPDA tool performs a scan of your existing Exchange and Active Directory environments and produces a report that lists all items that require attention prior to deployment.

Below are the Exchange related sessions from TechEd North America 2011.

• EXL309 Microsoft Exchange Online in Microsoft Office 365: Migration Case Study (John Logan, Danny Kim, Ann Vu)
• EXL310 Microsoft Exchange Online in Microsoft Office 365: Simple Migration Live! (Ram Poornalingam)
• EXL311 Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office 365: How to Set Up a Hybrid Deployment (Jim Lucey)
• EXL302 Archiving and Discovery in Microsoft Exchange 2010 SP1 and Exchange Online (Krish Sundaresan)
• EXL305 Best Practices for Successfully Transitioning to Microsoft Exchange 2010 (Rand Morimoto)
• EXL306 Best Practices for Virtualization of Microsoft Exchange 2010 (Jim Lucey, Jeff Mealiffe)
• EXL307 Load Balancing with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 (Andrew Ehrensing)
• EXL312 Designing Microsoft Exchange 2010 Mailbox High Availability for Failure Domains (Ross Smith)
• EXL313 Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Tips and Tricks (Scott Schnoll)
• EXL327 Real-World Site Resilience Design in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 (Robert Gillies)
• EXL401 Exchange Server 2010 High Availability Management and Operations (Scott Schnoll)
• EXL322 Microsoft Exchange Online: Unified Messaging in Microsoft Office 365 (Michael Wilson)
• EXL326 What’s New in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 SP2: Featuring GAL Segmentation (Greg Taylor)